


you will live forever

by meritmut



Category: Les Misérables (2012)
Genre: Afterlife, Gen, Post-Battle, everyone's dead but it's not so bad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-16
Updated: 2013-05-30
Packaged: 2017-12-12 00:42:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/805147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hand-in-hand, they come home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Maybe it’s the warmth of the day that slicks his palms with sweat (the pale sky shivers over their heads, silver clouds hide a fierce sun but do nothing to shield those down below from its heat and he thanks God with every breath for the pleasant breeze). Maybe it’s the racing of his heart or the soaring exultation of the hundreds, even thousands, who stand beside him and behind him and all around, the fallen and the resurrected, lifting their cries heavenward as they welcome in the new day…

_Heavenward? What further Heaven might there be? What more can be asked of the Lord than this deliverance?_

Whichever it is, heat or celebration, Combeferre’s hands are damp enough that the flag slips halfway through its swooping arc, and he feels it go - he feels himself lose his grip on the pole even as he realises that there’s little to be done about it. There’s no panic, no fear that he might drop it (he does not even know if one _can_ panic in Paradise), but still his fingers clench around it reflexively and at the last instant he succeeds in reclaiming it from the air, but swings it a little too hard in his efforts.

He doesn’t realise that he’s nearly injured someone with his erratic swing, that only her swift dodge saved her from the blow. He mightn’t have noticed her at all were it not for the loud oath that disturbs the perfect delight of this everlasting victory.

Glancing down to his right to where the curse had come from, Combeferre sees her for the first time.

Of course it’s not _really_ the first time, no: she’s only the merest slip of a girl, skinny and starved with wide eyes like pools of spilled black rum, but he still recognises her as the waif who had haunted Marius’ steps throughout their last spring.

In his fleeting span of heartbeats and heroics upon the earth she had been no more than a flicker on the edge of his consciousness, no more than the shadow of a reflection of that which they claimed to fight for. Hypocritical of them, he thinks for a moment, that the _Amis_ (well, him at least) had seen her only as they saw anyone who ever passed through their rallies, but paid her so little attention because she was not a threat and gave them scarce enough of her own. Hypocritical because Combeferre had pitied her a little - she had been what they struggled to liberate, after all - but done nothing to engage with her and the countless others who shared her misfortunes, and in the end she had died anyway. Shot down on their own barricade.

And for a moment he had held her in his arms. Combeferre had carried her and barely known it because she was gone before he’d even touched her, and it had been too easy to imagine that it was not a corpse he held. Too easy to tell himself that casualties could be minimised, that they would not be left to fight alone; too easy to push from his mind that the very people they hoped would rise up were no different to the girl who’d given up her life that same day for reasons very different to their own.

_They have no thought for revolutions when the prospect of tomorrow is by no means certain._

_(Would the people have risen to our call, if we had answered theirs?)_

Now, with no war to wage and no cause to consume, Combeferre can notice her properly, and it’s more than the tattered little shade that he sees.

She is young, yes, and has endured more than any child should in her short life, but with the sun alight in her dark hair and the promise of salvation in her eyes she stands tall upon the barricade in her red dress, and returns his stare quite fearlessly.

She is bold, he realises, and possibly very offended by his inept flag-waving.

“I…” words fail him momentarily but he summons them up when she crooks an eyebrow expectantly, and tilts her chin up, proud in her tiny stature and self-contained assurance. “I am sorry, Made - ah - _Citizeness._ That was careless of me.”

It occurs to him that he’s quite unreasonably flustered, and surmises it probably has something to do with those impenetrable eyes of hers.

Those eyes that widen now, almost imperceptibly, as to Combeferre’s astonishment the girl beams at him. She sniggers and snorts in a most unladylike fashion, shaking her bonny head as if an apology was the last thing in the world she’d been expecting.

At his bemused stare she only smiles wider, and explains.

“Pardon, Monsieur, you did no harm. I only laugh because you take such care, but what is there to care for now? We’re beyond it, surely…” and she gestures about her - takes in the sprawling heights of the barricade and the jubilation of those that stand upon it, the crackling of banners in the wind and so many souls raised up in song (Combeferre can hear Enjolras, a lightness to his voice that was never there before, and smiles for his old friend) with the sweep of her slender arm.

She’s not wrong.

“Nevertheless,” Combeferre shrugs lightly, and sets down the flag so that it rests against the rail beside them, its tricolour rippling outward and all but lost in the sea of scarlet and white and blue that surrounds them. One flag among thousands. They will not be missed.

(And far away, in that earthly land between the rising sun and the fading stars, France will wake without them, and maybe they won’t be missed there either. Combeferre does not mind.

_We stood and we fought, and if we failed then so be it: there is no futility in the valour of the right, and there is an eternity in the pursuit of just causes. Our names may slip from the tongues of the living but the fallen will never forget.)_

The girl smiles with surprising timidity considering her earlier bravado, and he returns it because if she won’t accept his apology then he can at least offer that.

“Think I’ll take myself off now, M’sieur,” she informs him, tugging at her shawl to make sure the knot will hold as she prepares to slither down from the barricade.

“Allow me,” Combeferre extends a hand so she can pass him without risking toppling (would she hurt herself if she fell? Are there bruises in Heaven? It doesn’t seem likely but it’s not the kind of experiment you impose on a young lady no matter her immortality). She spares it only a passing glance laden with not a little disdain, choosing instead to bestow another winning smile upon him as she takes her skirt up in one hand, slings the other around what appears to be a footstool firmly-wedged between a table and a coffin lid ( _morbid,_ he thinks with a faint shudder), and before he can even register how she does it, she’s sliding, hopping and vaulting to the ground.

She turns back to see him staring and the smile becomes a smirk.

From far below he watches her hold up her hand to him.

“Allow me,” she parrots with a cheeky head-tilt.

Combeferre finds himself grinning, and though he’s taller, longer and altogether graceless compared to the girl, with some thought and more coordination he manages to get himself most of the way down. Four feet from _terra firma_ he shelves his pride, reaches out and lets her grip his hand in her own impossibly-tiny one, showing him the way down.

“My thanks, Citizeness,” he inclines his head to her, still smiling faintly.

That eyebrow arches up again, and she lowers her gaze as if ashamed. Combeferre recalls again that in life she was among the wretched of the streets - would never have known how it is to be looked upon without dismay, contempt…

“Éponine,” she says quietly. “Only Éponine.”

 _This is a new life,_ he reminds himself. She’s known darkness and too much sorrow and little else in her brief time on earth, but now she is home, they are home (all of them: she has brothers aplenty in his friends if she will have them) and Combeferre resolves to change that.

He realises that he’s still holding her hand and gives it a little squeeze. He’s not sure he wants to be the one to relinquish the contact.

“Well then, Éponine,” meeting her gaze with warmth, he tilts his chin toward the city that awaits their footsteps through her golden streets, “what say we go from here and explore this Paradise of ours?”

Her mouth curves up a little, her eyes softening.

“I’d like that, M’sieur.”

“Combeferre,” he corrects gently, “only Combeferre.”

And she nods.

“I like that too.”


	2. Chapter 2

For all their intentions of exploring the city, they don’t stray far from the barricade on the Place de la Bastille and their wandering takes them on a rather circuitous route through the streets; the roar of voices is still clearly audible from where they are now, echoing between the tenements of this pale, shimmering Elysium to fill the air with the song of the resurrected thousands.

The streets themselves seem quiet by comparison, and neither Éponine nor Combeferre feel the need just yet to change that with discourse.

Paris, laid bare in all her shining pride and lifted from the grime and poverty that stains her earthly counterpart, is a thing of unmatched beauty and grace, but even she cannot hold his attention for long when the vivid curiosity alive in his companion’s eyes offers competition. There’s something so brilliantly and so preciously innocent about the way Éponine’s hungry stare seems to take in everything, soaking up their surroundings until she too seems to glow with a kind of stillness - a peace Combeferre realises without asking that she’d never known on Earth.

He watches her (when he’s not staring about them with equal fascination - Paris really is a work of art and it’s never been more apparent than when they are the lone viewers in her gallery) and ponders why the sharp lines of her face seem vaguely familiar, but it’s not until they pass along a street that’s very _definitely_ one Combeferre knows, and she shivers slightly despite the balmy weather, that he’s able to place her.

She tears her gaze from the haunted upper floor of the Musain, and when it settles on him he can tell she recognises him too.

“You carried me,” she says slowly, hesitantly: “you watched me die.”

There’s no such hesitation in Combeferre’s mind as he takes a step toward her, closing the distance between them.

(Though how can there be distance when he saw her at her most vulnerable and they stand together in Paradise now? It can only be imagined, surely, a philosophical gulf rather than a tangible one.)

Side-by-side, a scarce inch or so between his arm and hers, they look up toward the Musain and Éponine frowns, her features becoming grave and sad again.

“You died too. Here.”

Combeferre can only nod.

She glances up at him and mutters, “sorry. Know you lot were hoping to win. S’all for nothing, in the end.”

“No, not at all,” protests Combeferre, the need to dispute her sorry statement surprising him in its vehemence. He turns to face her fully, though he manages to resist the urge to take her by the elbows and force her to understand. “Not for nothing. We fought for the elevation of humanity - for the people. If we died, then we died, but there’s no…there’s nothing _vain_ about the struggle against injustice.”

“Didn’t do anything, though, did it?” she points out. There’s no malice in her tone, only a resigned sort of melancholy.

“That’s not the point,” he insists, “the way things are…it can’t go on forever. We tried to change it. To make things better. There’s good in that - there’s salvation.”

Éponine’s frown deepens but there’s an unmistakeable flicker of hope in her smoke-and-shadow eyes now, far from the defeat that has clung to her small frame despite the outer cheer of her manner. She is not, Combeferre thinks, a creature capable of remaining sorrowful for long. If she were, perhaps life might have beaten her that much the sooner.

“You truly believe that, M’sieur? That there’s hope for us?”

“Combeferre,” he corrects, “and yes, I truly do.”

She mulls it over for a moment before reaching out and slipping her arm through his, as she turns them both back around and pulls him from that ghost-filled street.

“Then so do I.”

She cheers up considerably after that, offering titbits of her life to him as they walk - she tells him of how on this street she pickpocketed a woman in the biggest dress she’d ever seen; down that alley she’d given her warm shoes to a kid whose own feet had gone black with the frost; on that corner she and her brother huddled one night, the boy’s defiant independence overcome by the cold.

She’s a merry maelstrom of warmth and vitality and harsh reminders that not all were so privileged as Combeferre and his friends; that there was and is a cruel reality behind the dreams they’d built their revolution upon. He’d borne her for a moment in his arms after her death and though he’d been distracted by the thought of the wounded students around him, he still remembers thinking of how light she was. She’d felt like a sack of bones and sinewy muscle, stunted and wasted by hardship, barely a weight at all.

And yet beside him she smiles so freely, as if his assurance that things would be different for them now had been all she needed to let her soul soar.

They’re back beside the barricade and the sun is just breaking through the clouds when a cry goes up, piping high and strangely familiar to Combeferre - and Éponine gives a joyous shout of her own, tearing away from his arm to chase its source.

He watches her race away toward a small figure who in turn is scrambling over the furniture to get to them - and as the child nears Combeferre recognises him as the young _gamin_ who’d died hunting for bullets below the barricade, the one Courfeyrac had been so fond of, and he grimaces at the memory.

Éponine kneels before the boy, her hands skimming over his arms and pushing his fair hair back from his face in a manner that’s almost maternal, and he’s grinning and letting her do it as if it’s the most wonderful thing in the world that she’s here too with him.

She’s crying by the time Combeferre reaches them, jabbering away at the boy in the slang of the streets, but she looks up with glittering eyes to grin at the student and rises to her feet with one arm slung protectively over the child’s shoulders.

“You know this one, I hear?” she smiles through her tears (and of course she’d weep, if the boy’s who Combeferre thinks he must be - it can’t fill her with joy to know her brother is dead).

“I’ve seen him about,” says Combeferre with a smile of his own, “he’s a smart lad.”

Gavroche cackles, and it’s cracked and hoarse but it’s so full of delight - delight to match the look that crosses his sister’s proud features.

“Can’t say the same for you, M’sieur, if you got yourself shot after all.”

Éponine rolls her eyes and nudges the boy with her hip. “You’re one to talk, you brat. We’re all for the dirt and the dark down below.”

Her gaze flicks briefly to Combeferre before he can protest the gloomy nature of that assertion (and he’s not sure what to make of the fact that she’d _known_ he would argue), and she amends quickly, “though there’s light aplenty up here, I suppose. If we’re to stay, I’ll be glad of the company.”

“And I,” agrees Combeferre warmly.

“They’re all here,” Gavroche tells them, apparently oblivious to the way they hold each other’s gaze. “Courf and Feuilly and - well, and all of them. Even the doctor. I seen ‘em about.”

“You all got yourselves killed, then,” Éponine’s mouth twists in a scowl that might be at their stupidity, but Combeferre suspects it might be more at having to exist alongside that stupidity all over again. Keeping her brother tucked safely into her side with one arm, she holds out her free hand to the former student and waits until his own encloses it.

“Shall we find them, then?”

“Won’t be difficult, I imagine,” he replies, “they never were hard to spot, and on a day like this…”

_On a day like this, they’ll be front and centre building us a republic in Heaven._

Combeferre glances at Éponine as they walk and notices a slight smile still playing across her lips at some thought or other, quiet and happier than she’s seemed all day (not that he knows her well enough to judge, but until now he hasn’t noticed her smiling just for the sake of it). The three of them pass out from under the towering shadow cast by the elephant across the place; Combeferre tilts his head back to welcome the brassy noontide light on his skin as the clouds dissolve and the world turns slowly to gold.

_On a day like this Enjolras will be shining like the sun._

At his side Éponine shakes out her long hair and closes her eyes contentedly, and in the sunlight she is shining too.


End file.
